Becoming Free, Becoming Black
The year was 1690. In the city of Havana, Cuba, a 20-year old enslaved woman named Juana asked the man who held her in slavery, one Juan Junco González, to grant her…
Category: Book Talk, Monuments and Counter-Monuments
El misterio de las causalidades
Are the coincidences in our lives just random or could they have hidden causes and deeper meanings? Argentine author Maud Daverio Cox…
For Christ and Country
In the opening scene of James Weis’s superb For Christ and Country, Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico…
Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
Here is how I would translate the experience of reading this book into an image: an old chest, half-opened, slightly scary but quite inviting. As you opened it up, maps, travelogues, legal…
Wait for Me
Forty years ago, when traveling to visit family and friends in Europe from conflict zones of Central America, I was often asked: “So, how are things going over there?” But there was…
